The latest in pig ultrasound technology
Here at BOTL Farm, we are a birth to slaughter operation. That seemingly simple sentence sets us apart from the herd (heh). Most farms that raise pigs buy in feeders (farmer jargon for piglets that are born somewhere else and are anywhere from 6 weeks to 4 months old). We're not just talking CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) or industrial ag, this includes most small farms. We, on the other hand, maintain a group of sows (farmer jargon for breeding female pigs) that produce all the feeders we raise and harvest. But we don't have any boars (farmer jargon for breeding male pigs). Instead, we are the boar.
We note the estrus (farmer jargon for heat cycle) of each sow, order boar semen shipped overnight (so fresh!) from a semen bank in Iowa (hey, International Boar Semen!), and carefully "apply" the semen. We'll spare you the details, but ask us about AI (not that AI, this stands for artificial insemination) if you want to learn more. Then, we anxiously wait to see if each sow comes back into heat. This process is complicated because our sows often have a 'false' first heat cycle after AI is successful. To further complicate it, no pig breeders online ever report their sows having false heat cycles, so is it just us? We've spent a lot of time over the past years trying to guess if our sows are pregnant or not, often with disappointing results.
Enter our savior: the Preg-Tone II. It's a portable ultrasound device for pigs that we've been aware of for years, but never quite convinced ourselves to invest in. Now that we're older and wiser, we decided it was time to take control of the situation and we placed an order for our very own Preg-Tone. It's delightfully simple: there are no screens or images, you just lube up a specific place on the pig, point the device in the right direction and make sure there's good skin contact. It goes BEEP BEEP BEEP when it has good contact with the pig and BEEEEEEEEEEP if the pig is pregnant. Needless to say, we've checked ourselves, our dogs, and all our pigs for pregnancies. Turns out, the device is boring, reliable, and calibrated to only detect amniotic fluid in pigs. BEEEEEEEEEEEEP
The businesses we rely on to do business
Farmers don't farm in a vacuum [our physicist-turned-farmer notes that many physics models rely on spherical chickens in vacuums because it's pretty hard to accurately model the complexity of the real world without simplifying approximations]. Anyways, we rely on a network of businesses that we couldn't function without. These range from
our large-animal slaughterhouse (The Livestock Institute, which runs Meatworks)
the cooperative commercial kitchen where we make lard, bone broth, and sausages (CLiCK Willimantic)
the third-party certifier of our animal welfare and grass fed certifications (A Greener World)
the mass-mailing service we use to send these newsletters (May First Movement Technology)
organizations that educate and provide grants for sustainable farmers (American Farmland Trust and Food Animal Concerns Trust)
Besides their necessity in our lives, these groups have another thing in common: they're all non-profits.
We've been thinking about this a lot. Why are they all non-profits? Are we subconsciously self-selecting non-profit business partners? Is there just no profit to be made by organizations supporting small farmers in the regenerative ag space? Is it a coincidence? All of the above? We don't have the answer, but hats off to the folks doing the often-thankless work at these non-profits that we can't do without.
In case you have more money than you know what to do with this month, you can donate to any or all of these non-profits and they'll put your excess funds towards worthy causes.
New market season, new price structure
As our biggest farm fans know, we've offered a cash and check discount for eggs and animal feed products for years. We're leaning (even further) into the idea of a local economy. If people pay with cash or check, all those funds go to us which we can then spend at our local feed mill, slaughterhouse, etc. If we process a credit card, debit card, Apple Pay, Venmo, PayPal, etc., approximately 4% of the sale flies away from us and lands at a big corporation. Starting this market season (aka now), we're offering a cash and check discount of 4% on all our products.
In other news, our farm is officially approved to accept SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). That means everyone with SNAP funds can shop from us at all our markets and on farm. Our buds at Assawaga Farm have also been approved to accept SNAP, so when their farm stand opens (in two short weeks) all (two) vendors (us and them) will accept SNAP. Hooray.
It's chick season for normal people
We do crazy things like get day-old chicks in the middle of winter, but for most chicken "parents" [editor notes that we do not identify as parents of feathered beings] now is the time you're probably thinking about getting chickens. As resellers of super premium animal feed from New Country Organics, we field lots of questions about chick rearing for new chick "parents." Every year we write a little nugget about how much feed to offer for different life stages or what the different lines of feed mean but this year we decided to do something new. Instead of writing a blurb in our newsletter, we have expanded our already-prodigious website even further by adding a chicken feed FAQ page [editor notes this takes our website from 258 to 259 pages, woo].
Find Us
On farm store: Every Wednesday noon - 2pm, every Saturday 1 - 3pm. Pre-order
On farm self pickup: Every day 8am - 8pm. Pre-order only
Wooster Square Market, New Haven CT: This market runs every Saturday from 9am - 1pm until the end of November. We will be there every other week. Dates we’ll be there in May: May 09 and May 23. Pre-order
Assawaga Farm Store: This market starts with the yearly Plant Sale from 9am - 2pm on Saturday May 16. We'll be there with meat and eggs the whole time. Then it runs every Saturday from 9am - noon from now until Thanksgiving. We will be there every other week. Dates we'll be there in May: May 16 and May 30. Pre-order
Ask a Farmer Anything, virtual question sessions: second Monday of every month from 7:30 - 8:30pm and fourth Thursday of every month from 8 - 9am. Dates in May: May 11 and May 28. Registration free but required
It's too many dates! Save me!
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